If you’ve been around SEO for a while, you know how targeting competitive keywords is something experts highly discourage. You’ve been told to stick with low-competition and longtail keywords for better success. But is it true that competitive keyword is hard to target? Yes, generally they are. But this shouldn’t stop you from trying if you’re up for the competition. In this guide, we’ll show you how to target for competitive keywords and succeed.
Why Are Competitive Keywords Hard To Target?
Experts do have some merit when they say competing for popular keywords is hard. This is because of two main reasons:
These websites have established high authority in their industry. Particularly if your website is new, it is almost impossible to compete with heavy-traffic and long established websites. Google takes into account a site’s authority when it comes to the age of domain, a number of inbound links, etc.
It is VERY competitive. Common sense dictates that if a keyword is searched more times by users compared to others, more businesses will want to target those keywords as well. Without site authority, it can be extremely difficult to compete for those keywords, which is why new sites are encouraged to target less competitive ones.
The gist? In order to rank for competitive keywords, you need to establish site authority. How do you do this? Mind you, it will take a lot of time and effort, but your business would be all for the better in the long run. Check out our guide below.
Start Slow
Here’s something you probably don’t want to hear, but if you're going to compete with popular keywords, you need to target long-tail keywords first. Long-tail keywords are more extended, more specific keywords that generally have low competition. Targeting competitive keywords without site authority can cause your site to be hidden into a pile of other ignored links. Which is why you need to start slow; get ranked for long-tail keywords, gain traffic, and once your site is established, you can try competing for harder keywords.
Create A LOT Of High-Quality Content
These days, having useful and relevant content is something you need to have for any of your digital campaigns to work. Search engine algorithms have developed ways to rank high-quality content over things like the number of inbound links and on-page SEO. In fact, low-quality, spammy content can cause your SEO rankings to lower. Your content creation should suit the type of business you have and the keywords you are targeting. Content is the glue that holds SEO together. High-quality content is what gets your site valuable links, leads, and direct sales. This is why it’s crucial to produce a steady stream of relevant and actionable content so your site can gain authority.
Build Links The Legitimate Way
Google and other search engines have become smarter. Unlike before, you can no longer cheat your way into building a high number of links. Today, that method can get you penalized. One of the defining factors in Google’s SEO scoring is not the number of inbound links, but the quality. You should practice safe and honest link building that will help you obtain backlinks from reputable, high-traffic websites. No matter what you do, NEVER purchase links or resort to any sort of blackhat SEO. It will only get you in trouble. Instead, build links by guest blogging, email marketing, and other legitimate ways that are recognized by search engines. You may also try starter links, it's good for your branding, add more referral and back-links.
Starter links
Social fortress ring - This is good for new site or established site that doesn't have any social ring/properties locked up. It's good for branding, reputation and social interactions. It is where you can build up your list of social and locked up your brand name because this will give you more authority to your site, pass more social quality links and branding popularity. Check image below:
You can create on high authority sites such as:
Facebook
Twitter
About.me
Linkedn
Youtube
Blogger
Google +
Instagram
Medium
And lot's more! there are likely 400 + high quality social fortress accounts.
Web 2.0 Builder- Build up your brand and customize subdomain with your brand name and put a lot of good content, this strategy is good for starter links, it's a good starting point of getting contextual backlinks. Just be sure to balance the anchor text and always use your brand, naked links as your anchor text to build natural way of legitimate links. Be sure to highly optimize the blogs/sites by adding landing pages, blogs, images, video etc. This will help your site gain more authority with high DA, branding and backlinks. Web 2.0 is a good starter links because it will read it up in Ahrefs as backlinks as soon as it indexed.
Google My Business ( GMB ) - Google love's business and so the people who do business. GMB is a good starter links for targeting local or international. So, if you're one of business owner and want to discover your products, store, shop etc. Then you should engage in GMB. It will also have your links and indexed in google map. Google will love your site
Google Sites - The best thing is that you can create your own site in Google or create a blog post in there and you can add your main website with a naked links or branding anchor, now this is truly a valuable link that you can get it. It's free and all you'll have to do is to write quality content about your niche topic and link it, BOOM! just like that. I't a good way to get a starter links and authority link since Google site is high authoritative site.
Citations - The #2 best starter links you can have it when starting a business or established site. Citations is good for local store, shop, coffee shop, restaurant or even digital marketing company. I't s the best known for NAP ( Business name, address & Phone number) So, this is the most important thing when engaging into citations business listing. It's like you will have all your important details about your site and claim as your business listing. Try to get local citations of popular citation listing such as:
Yelp
Yellowpages
BBB
Manta
Hotfrog
Yahoo
The Takeaway
Competing for popular keywords is hard. But it is definitely not impossible. Once you have established a website that has authority, everything else will come easy, including SEO. For now, you have to work hard to reach the top. Focus first on list of task below if you want to compete for competitive keywords:
Build your site authority
Write quality content
Build Your metrics
Blogging
Start creating the starter links with high authority sites, popular sites.
Do not rank specific keywords yet, just try to build foundation first.